Installation of Oracle Data Relationship Management on Windows Server 2012

In this blog, I will talk about the installation of Oracle Data Relationship Management on Windows Server 2012. The reason I am putting out this blog is very simple. I faced a lot of issues in installing the Oracle DRM and kept getting weird issues and after a whole lot of research and help from the technology team at James & Monroe (they pointed me in the right direction in a jiffy), I was finally able to get it up and running.

Now, the install will be divided into several parts, but this will cover only the installation of DRM. Repository and application creation in DRM will be reserved for another day, another time.

Now, this is a fresh server (as fresh as it gets)…Also, this will not be a smooth install since I will be facing a lot of issues and resolving them at runtime. So let us strap our seat belts and continue on the journey.

The first thing that needs to be done is to enable the Internet Information Services which is the default web server of the Windows NT family. Remember that this is not enabled by default.

To enable the IIS, we need to go to the Server Manager->Add Roles and Features as shown in the below snapshot. Steps for enabling the IIS is shown below. In addition to IIS, .NET Framework 4.5 also needs to be enabled since DRM requires that. 

The next step would be installation of Oracle Data Relationship Management. Now, Oracle DRM is a separate installable and is not present in the Oracle Foundation downloads. Also, it is available only for the Microsoft family and not for the Unix/Linux based systems. 

(This was my reaction when I realized that DRM cannot be installed on Linux  Darth Vader shouting no.... Its a funny video to watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWaLxFIVX1s  ) 

The snapshots of the DRM installation is as shown below:-

Now, to access the Oracle DRM Web client, we make use of the following URL:-

http://<server where DRM is installed>/drm-web-client/

 

When, I tried to run this URL on the server, I got an error as shown in the below snapshot.

The fix for this is that there are two properties at the web server level in the applicationServer configuration files that are by default set to “Deny”

These need to be changed to “Allow” and is documented in the DRM guide.

 

The configuration file is usually present at the following path as shown in the below snapshot and is called the applicationHost.config file.

The configuration file and the section that needs to be changed is as shown in the section below.

The configuration file after changes is as shown below.

I now try to access the Oracle DRM web client URL once again and I get a new error as shown in the below snapshot.

This is promising, since it means that we are on the right track. A new error is a new learning opportunity…

Now, I checked the DRM install guide and I thought this was because of IIS6 Metabase Compatibility and so I installed that component as shown in the below snapshots.

However, in spite of this, the error didn’t resolve which indicates that the error is more on lines with some other setting that is missed. If you check the error, it indicates that the server is not able to understand the MIME type.

Now, as this was pointed out to me, this can be an issue with the .NET 4.5 extensions missing. 

So, I went back to add roles and features to the server. Now the catch is that .NET Framework 4.5 features are present under .Net Framework 3.5 for some reason. I selected the necessary features for .NET 4.5 as shown in the below snapshots and installed them.

Once, the features were installed, I tried to access the Oracle DRM Web Client URL once again.

And this time it works… (Hello DRM, this is Houston, we are so glad to see you… in my Gene Kranz impersonation..)

The error that you get when you access the DRM Web client is because the repository and applications are not configured... On a successfully configured application and repository, it will show a page as follows.